FROM “Criswell Predicts,”
Fabulous Las Vegas, November 1970
Here is a hush hush hush prediction! Mysterious cracks in the floor of the ocean are appearing not only on the Pacific Coast but also on the Atlantic Coast! Those cracks are up to 50 feet wide and ten miles long! Our Scientists are puzzled and if our Scientists are puzzled, we should be terrified!
With the trucker movie Moonfire set for release in 1971, Sonny’s acting career was beginning to take off. Maybe he wasn’t ready for The Godfather, which was the hottest property in Hollywood. As the Sun’s entertainment writer Ralph Pearl reported, “Every big star from Edward G. Robinson to Anthony Quinn, Rod Steiger, Ernie Borgnine and John Marley . . . down to San Francisco mouthpiece Melvin Belli [is] begging for the part. Even Danny Thomas wants a crack at that role.” But there was a place for Sonny’s type of tough guy in the string of blaxploitation movies that were about to swamp America. Gordon Parks’s Shaft would debut in 1971, setting off a genre race with franchise pictures like Super Fly, Foxy Brown, and Blacula. Two years later, the studios wouldn’t be able to pump out sequels fast enough, explaining the celluloid gifts that were Shaft in Africa, Scream Blacula Scream, and Super Fly T.N.T.
Hollywood was crashing between two decades. At the Academy Awards back in April, sixty-two-year-old John Wayne received his first Oscar for portraying an aging marshal in True Grit. But the award for best film went to the far grittier Midnight Cowboy, an X-rated story of a male hooker braving the streets of New York. Television was in flux, too. In a couple of months All in the Family would debut on CBS. For the moment the network’s Friday-night lineup offered a television show adapted from the medical movie The Interns, as well as a new star vehicle for Andy Griffith and a movie of the week. NBC was slightly more adventurous. It paired an old-fashioned western, The High Chaparral, with a big-budget police serial, The Name of the Game, and a back-lot Hollywood drama called Bracken’s World. ABC, meanwhile, went for family comedies: The Brady Bunch at 7:30 p.m., followed by Nanny and the Professor, The Partridge Family, and the fifth season of That Girl. At 9:30 it slipped in the anthology Love, American Style.
Compared with the other shows, Love was risqué. Its sly look at sex in 1970 pushed boundaries for its time, even though it used well-known actors from the fifties and early sixties. When executive producer Arnold Margolin got a script for an episode called “Love and the Champ,” he thought it was a no-brainer to reach out to Sonny. “I figured it was a one-scene role,” Margolin would recall. “We could contain the damage if it didn’t work out.” For Sonny, the gig was a no-brainer, too. It would give him an excuse to go to L.A., pocket an easy thousand bucks, and party.
When it came time for his 6:00 a.m. camera call on the Paramount lot, Sonny showed up looking like he hadn’t slept in days. Margolin welcomed his guest star warmly. But Sonny wasn’t in the mood to be congenial. In fact, he snarled when Margolin told him that the script he’d been sent had undergone a few changes. It’s likely that Sonny was too embarrassed to say he couldn’t read the changes. Instead he said simply, “I do the lines I learned.”
“It was the only time I ever felt threatened by an actor,” Margolin would say. “I figured it wasn’t worth getting killed for an eight-minute segment.”
The filming took place in the summer, with the airdate scheduled for Thanksgiving. “The timing was perfect,” Margolin added. “It was a turkey.”
—
As the Listons prepared to celebrate Thanksgiving at home, Sonny got into his Caddy for a quick trip into town. There’s no telling where he was going. To see his mistress? To make a quick trip to the Westside to score? To place a bet at the International? Maybe it was all three. Or maybe Geraldine had just run out of cooking broth and needed him to go to the store. It didn’t matter.
As he’d done a thousand times before, Sonny pulled out of their development and pulled onto East Desert Inn Road, heading west toward the Strip. After a mile and a quarter, he reached Cayuga Parkway and started to make a left when the driver of a Mercury came speeding down the parkway in the opposite direction. The Mercury was going so fast that Sonny had no time to react to an impact that was swift and intense. His Eldorado went screeching into a telephone pole, hitting with such force that it nearly folded in half. Sonny’s chest went into the steering wheel, literally bending it as his head plowed into the windshield.
By the time paramedics arrived at the scene, Sonny had staggered out of the car, his face covered in blood from the glass shards embedded in it. An ambulance took him to Sunrise Hospital, where plastic surgeons worked laboriously to pull out each piece of glass, one at a time. It was excruciating work, and Sonny, who was still in mild shock, suffered it quietly. According to Lem Banker, who rushed to the hospital, the only thing that bothered him was the shot of anesthesia that he got. After all he’d been through, he still hated needles that much.
Sonny was sent home that night for what was a less than relaxing Thanksgiving. And the next evening, while he was still recovering, he settled in with a few friends to see himself on Love, American Style.
If he was inclined to be amused at the way he looked in a situation comedy, he had a hard time doing it out loud. With twenty stitches in his head and a citation beside him for failing to yield the right of way, it hurt to laugh. And the next day, Saturday, November 28, he still wasn’t right. He felt pains in his chest, the kind that a man his age shouldn’t be feeling. Sonny told Geraldine, who loaded him up in her green Caddy and took him to Southern Nevada Memorial Hospital.
That month, The Ring magazine ranked him fourth in the heavyweight division, which was four spots higher than he’d been just a few months earlier. But there was something nagging about this injury, something that made him feel mortal. Geraldine was pushing for him to retire, as was his friend Davey Pearl, and he was beginning to think they were right. Given the way his blood pressure had been going up, it probably wasn’t a bad idea for him to chill out for a few days and enjoy some heavy medication.
On Wednesday, December 2, while he was still under sedation, Sonny opened the Las Vegas Sun to see a story on the third page about his accident: “Former Boxing Champ Liston Hospitalized Here After Auto Wreck.” “I don’t think it’s going to keep me from fighting,” he told the paper, trying to sound optimistic. “But you can’t always tell about these things. I feel as well as I expected to.”
His story, however, was overshadowed by this banner headline on the front page:
HOWARD HUGHES VANISHES! MYSTERY BAFFLES CLOSE ASSOCIATES
By Hank Greenspun
SUN PUBLISHER (COPYRIGHT LAS VEGAS SUN 1970)
Howard Hughes, often called the phantom financier since he established permanent residence in Las Vegas in 1966, is involved in a disappearance from Nevada under circumstances even more mysterious than his secrecy-shrouded arrival.
The billionaire industrialist arrived in Las Vegas on Thanksgiving eve and the Sun learned yesterday he vanished from his Desert Inn residence on the exact date four years later.
Las Vegans have long been intrigued by the story that Hughes came to Las Vegas on a special train from which he alighted at a remote desert siding and was whisked to his specially prepared quarters at the Desert Inn.
That story pales in comparison with the facts of his departure. . . .
—
Howard Hughes first arrived in Las Vegas on November 23, 1966, in a pair of private Pullman railcars with their curtains drawn. As his biographers Donald Barlett and James Steele would recount, the journey “symbolized a complete break with [his] past.” The billionaire was looking to leave Hollywood, where he’d lived since he started making pictures in 1925, and he rented the top two floors of the Desert Inn for what was initially planned as a ten-day vacation. He saw so much building potential along the Strip, however, that he wound up buying the hotel, putting down the then-considerable sum of $6.2 million.
Hughes wasted no time throwing his influence around. He seduced leading politicians with promises to move his aerospace interests into Nevada and offered to finance a medical school on the University of Nevada’s campus that had been imperiled by budget cuts. Even though he hadn’t been seen in public for nearly five years and neglected to supply a mandatory photo of himself, the news that Nevada’s newest billionaire was so civic-minded allowed his gaming application to sail through.
At least initially, the city’s district attorney, George Franklin, saw Hughes as a long-awaited counterweight to the mob. “The best way to improve the image of gambling in Nevada is by licensing an industrialist of his stature,” he said upon Hughes’s arrival. But a few years later Franklin was regretting his enthusiasm. Hughes’s tangle of shell companies was drawing questions from U.S. stock regulators. At a Lions Club dinner, Franklin alluded to Hughes’s holdings by telling his audience, “We have received more bad publicity with [his] corporations than we did when we had . . . the Purple Gang and the Cleveland mob.”
But, unlike Bugsy Siegel and the others who built Las Vegas, Hughes had a vision that was iterative. Where the old-timers brought Hollywood glamour, Hughes wanted a more updated, urban version of discretion and class. “I like to think of Las Vegas in terms of a well-dressed man in a dinner jacket and a furred female getting out of an expensive car,” he wrote. “I think that is what the people expect here—to rub shoulders with V.I.P.’s and stars.”
While Hughes kept himself holed up in his penthouse at the Desert Inn with the windows blacked out, feverishly writing longhand memos at all hours of the night, he relied on an ex–FBI agent, Robert Maheu, to help him juggle his interests.
Maheu rose quickly in Hughes’s orbit. With nearly complete discretion to manage the billionaire’s sprawling $300 million Nevada empire, he moved his family into a half-million-dollar mansion in Paradise Palms and threw his boss’s influence around with remarkable aplomb. He held opulent society parties at his home, attended ribbon cuttings, and offered what purported to be Hughes’s opinions when reporters phoned for comments on Nevada’s affairs.
Even though he never actually met Hughes in person, getting all his instructions by wire or over the phone, Maheu also managed to keep the billionaire from making some headstrong mistakes, such as when Hughes became so paranoid about radiation leakage from the underground nuclear tests in the desert that he wanted to offer Richard Nixon a million-dollar bribe to end them.
The problem for Maheu was that his power rested solely on his relationship with Hughes, and that left him vulnerable to a whisper campaign from the executives who had been left behind at Hughes headquarters at 7000 Romaine Street in Los Angeles. The head of that faction was a sober, well-schooled executive named Frank William “Bill” Gay.
Like the others in his orbit, Gay resented Maheu’s quick ascent in Hughes’s chain of command and the fact that he was secretly using the profits they created in California to mask his huge deficits in Nevada. Hughes’s Las Vegas operation had lost $3.8 million in 1968 and $8.4 million in 1969, and was on a pace to lose a staggering $14 million in 1970.
Midway through 1970, Gay confronted Hughes about the deficits. Several sudden shocks, including a $180 million judgment in a decade-old case involving Trans World Airlines, had left him with barely $20 million in working funds for the year. All of a sudden Maheu’s spiraling debt was no joke.
Hughes began to listen to the criticisms that he’d previously ignored and even to intimations that Maheu had stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars to finance his lofty lifestyle. In a sudden burst of suspicion, Hughes called for an audit of his entire Las Vegas operation while green-lighting a transfer of power to Gay.
On Thanksgiving Eve, a phalanx of limousines with California license plates surrounded the Desert Inn and a small army of men emerged to take Hughes out of the ninth-floor complex he’d occupied in seclusion for four years. The story splashed across the front page of the Sun reflected Maheu’s estrangement: “Even those closest to [Hughes] in Nevada operations were left in total bewilderment. . . . The absence of an explanation creates disturbing and disquieting conjectures.” Grasping at straws, Maheu admitted that he “could shed no light on the strange development” and suggested that Gay’s Romaine Group may have abducted Hughes.
The disappearance was the only thing anyone in Las Vegas could talk about for days. A public relations firm tried to quell the furor by insisting that Hughes was just on a business trip, but that half-truth didn’t go far. The reality was that a civil war had broken out.
While Sonny still lay hospitalized, Gay swept into Las Vegas to set up his own command center on the top floor of the Sands. Unleashing an army of auditors on Hughes’s casinos, he seized the money and chips in the cashiers’ cages and sent Maheu a message telling him that he had until sunset to resign.
Gay, however, underestimated the small-town politics of Las Vegas. Using his contacts at the Sun, Maheu issued a statement warning that a rogue group of corporate pirates had initiated “an authorized takeover of the operations of Mr. Howard Hughes’ properties.” He also obtained a federal order to restrain Gay from looting the casinos. The Sun played along by noting it was the anniversary of Pearl Harbor and referring to Gay’s group as an “invading faction.” When Gay’s lawyer suggested that they should sell Hughes’s casinos if this was the way they were going to be treated, it led to another spasm of local suspicion about newcomers’ intentions.
The politicians who relied on Maheu’s generosity were in a quandary about what to do. The governor, Paul Laxalt, suggested that Hughes return to Las Vegas to make his feelings known. But Hughes, who was hiding in the Bahamas, was in no condition to return. Recovering from a bout of pneumonia, he was down to ninety-five pounds and could not stand on his own. Instead, he told Gay to invite Laxalt to the Sands for an extraordinary 1:30 a.m. phone call in which the billionaire assured him that he’d personally approved Maheu’s ouster.
Laxalt left the Sands convinced that Hughes was both coherent and in command, and in one of his last acts as governor he phoned Maheu to say it would be in everyone’s interests if he gave up.
But Maheu and his loyalists remained undeterred. A Las Vegas attorney with close ties to the ex‒FBI agent heightened the drama by telling a packed press conference that someone who was masquerading as Hughes had been on the phone with Laxalt. “If I was convinced these were the wishes of Mr. Hughes, I would leave forthwith,” said the attorney, Tom Bell, casting a knowing glance around the room. He also warned the packed room of reporters that Hughes was in grave danger because his abductors had left “vital climate control devices necessary to insure his proper breathing” at the Desert Inn.
With both sides locked in a high-stakes standoff, Gay finally went to federal court to get his own restraining order, setting the stage for a showdown over the future of Hughes’s fortune the likes of which Las Vegas had never seen, and which completely overshadowed the foundering fortunes of a hospitalized heavyweight.
—
Across the country, in New York on December 7, fight fans were hoping to see a brawl of at least equal caliber. As a sellout crowd streamed into Madison Square Garden to see Muhammad Ali face Oscar Bonavena, a photographer for Life magazine captured men sporting walking sticks, clad in capes, and wearing pinstriped suits paired with polar-bear-white fur hats.
Although Ali didn’t look particularly sharp against Jerry Quarry in Atlanta, he appeared to have providence on his side this time around. After the weigh-in at the Garden, a basketball player who was practicing for a game that night tossed Ali a ball at half court. The promoter, Harry Markson, later recalled watching Ali heave the ball, “and I’ll be damned if it didn’t go in, swish. Everyone just stared in awe but that was the kind of luck I figured followed Ali.”
Ali figured he was lucky, too. The day of the fight, he stayed up until 6:00 a.m. talking with friends about the potential of his showdown with Joe Frazier, all the while seeming to look past Bonavena. It’s understandable why Ali was so focused on the future. An appeals court had just reaffirmed his draft-dodging conviction, meaning he had only a few months of freedom unless the U.S. Supreme Court did the improbable and stepped in to save him.
In boxing terms, he was in the fifteenth round of his legal case and needed a knockout to win.
Bonavena, however, wasn’t a fighter who deserved to be overlooked. His Hall of Fame trainer, Gil Clancy, had spent a lot of time watching Ali and developed a shrewd strategy: Bonavena would let himself get worked into the corners to cut down on the angles that Ali liked to use to use and then strike. “When he punches, he has to be attached to his arm,” Clancy told him. “So if he hits you or misses the punch, either way, he’s at the other end of that arm.”
When the bell clanged at the Garden just before 11:00 p.m., Bonavena leapt from his corner in a crouching stance to start slinging punches right away. For all the hours Ali had spent sparring, he never anticipated a tough fight, and now he was getting a rude awakening. “Every day in the gym he’d talk Frazier,” Angelo Dundee told the writer Michael Arkush. “I finally had to show him Bonavena’s picture and tell him, this is who you are fighting.” The Garden mischievously paired Howard Cosell at ringside with Joe Frazier’s manager, Yank Durham, and Durham couldn’t help needling his fighter’s next opponent. “Clay definitely don’t have what he had before,” he said. “I can see that.”
Through the early rounds, Ali fought flat-footed and absorbed some powerful punches. “Strange thing to see. You’ve not seen Ali like this before,” a mystified Cosell said at the end of the fourth, and by the seventh, when Bonavena was gaining strength: “This is not the Ali style at all, at least as how it used to exist.”
Traces of the old Ali finally began to emerge midway through the ninth round when a Bonavena punch to his head awakened him and he responded with a flurry of jabs, uppercuts, and crosses. With a minute left in the round, Ali opened a cut over Bonavena’s eye. But the men were so exhausted by the exchange that they spent the rest of the fight swinging at air. “There’s no doubt in my mind he’s a worried fighter,” Durham said of Ali in the tenth, and after the eleventh: “I don’t know if he’ll even be able to continue this fight.”
By the beginning of the fifteenth round, fans were booing Ali, although he was ahead on points. Durham, sensing that his earlier criticisms might have been a bit overheated, hedged by telling Cosell, “Howard, I still have Ali ahead on points but if Bonavena can win this round it will be a very tough fight to judge.” Cosell, ever the reporter, jumped in with a question: “Now, all right. If Ali should win this round by a decision, Yancey, will his performance tonight affect a potential fight against your man, Frazier?”
At that point fans in Timbuktu could smell Durham smelling the money. “No, Howard. I think this is a fight the public want to see, and I’m glad to see, if he wins this fight, it goes to fifteen rounds. I think it put him in good condition.”
As the final round began, Ali snapped his head back to avoid one of Bonavena’s wildest punches, but Cosell was skeptical. “You saw Oscar at his wildest there, missing, falling off balance, but there was no Ali to take advantage of it,” he complained. “There was no speed left. There was no movement left.”
But then, suddenly, there was.
With a minute and thirty seconds left to the fight, Bonavena let his guard down long enough for Ali to take the express train home. In close quarters, he found a path to Bonavena’s head and gave him a thunderous straight-ahead jab. Before the crowd could process what had happened, Bonavena staggered like someone who’d been shot unknowingly from a distance and fallen. “Oh, that left!” Cosell shouted. “It came from nowhere.” Bonavena staggered to his feet but two more punches ended it.
In the corner, amid the pandemonium, Ali kept his eye on the prize he was fighting for. “The layoff bothered me,” he told Cosell. “I missed a lot of punches. But I’m glad it was the war it was. . . . Now we have the chance to see who the real champion of the world is.”
—
Shortly after the Bonavena fight, two executives of Madison Square Garden took a train to Philadelphia to make Frazier the long-awaited offer to face Ali.
Frazier had gotten his start in 1965 with the backing of a syndicate that bought eighty shares in him for $250 apiece. Since then, those shares had split five times, yielding a paper value of $14,400 each. “If Frazier were to retire tomorrow, he’d get $218,000 in cold cash,” one of the group’s directors told The Ring magazine. Half of that was invested for Frazier and the other half was distributed as a weekly salary of $400. In addition, a trust fund had been set up for his four kids.
Frazier had been anticipating the fight with Ali for some time. In late 1969, the two ran into each other in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, where Frazier did his daily four-mile run. Ali began kicking up dust and shadowboxing and soon a crowd gathered, urging the men on. As Frazier would later recall, “Clay being Clay, he put up his hands and started jiving. He liked to do that with guys who were future opponents. He wanted to measure them to see if he could hit them.” Frazier pushed his hands away, but instead of backing off, Ali flicked a left and shouted, “Let’s get it on right here.”
Frazier liked Ali and was shrewd enough to understand his antics. (This was, after all, the same twenty-six-year-old fighter who played with his band, the Knockouts, in the lounge of Caesars; show business wasn’t a foreign concept.) So he went along with the gag and suggested that they meet at a local gym run by the Police Athletic League. What he didn’t count on was that Ali would arrive in his trunks with hundreds of spectators and swamp the tiny gym. The cops who showed up weren’t amused and told the men to take their rumble back to Fairmont Park.
A few years earlier, all Ali had to do was show up on the tarmac at Miami’s airport and call Liston “an ugly bear” to get headlines. But the bar for him was higher now. What he said carried weight. And as he jumped into his red convertible and drove off, he yelled at Frazier, “He wants to prove he’s the champ. Let him prove it here in the ghetto, where the colored folks can see it.”
By the time Frazier’s manager, Yank Durham, got wind of what was going on, he put an end to the stunt. But instead of deciding that he’d milked their chance encounter for all he could, Ali continued his crude attacks on Frazier. In his interview with The Black Scholar, he singled out Frazier for dating a white woman and summed up his contributions to boxing by saying, “Now the white man’s got the heavyweight champion.”
The remark blindsided Frazier. The last thing he expected was for Ali to come into his city acting what he called all “high-hat on me.” And he really didn’t like Ali “talking about me as if I was some head-scratching dumb nigger.” In his autobiography, Frazier would write, “[It was] cruel and unworthy. And in its way, sadistic, like pulling the wings off a dying insect. . . . Clay knew . . . the struggle a black man had, growing up in Beaufort, South Carolina. [He] knew that in saying what he did, he was playing me cheap and leaving Joe Frazier, and his children, open to ridicule—worse, he was encouraging it.”
It’s possible that Ali was using Frazier to burnish his black credentials in case he needed them in prison. Or maybe he figured that if he couldn’t fight Frazier, he’d tarnish the reigning champion’s title in any way that he could. After Frazier beat Ellis at Madison Square Garden the next January, he returned to his hotel room dead tired. When the phone rang, he picked it up to hear Ali on the other end. As he later said to reporters:
“I told him I don’t want no foolishness. I’m tired of the [Muslim] changes he been going through and the poem thing, and I don’t want being shoved or slapped by him on the street no more. I’m not saying Cassius has the mind of a child, but that sort of stuff’s for kids trying to pick a fight. I want him to grow up and maybe someday we’ll be able to settle it. I don’t feel Clay or anyone else can whup me.”
Maybe that was true. But Ali, the committed pacifist, was clearly prepared to use the politics of personal destruction to get an edge for a fight that hadn’t even been arranged yet.
And sadly, it worked. The Madison Square Garden executives arrived in Philadelphia with an offer that dwarfed anything Frazier had anticipated. They were ready to guarantee him $1.25 million to fight Ali in New York. As Arkush noted in The Fight of the Century, Frazier tried jotting the figure down but stumbled because he had no idea where to put the commas.
The Garden executives assumed they had an inside track, because Frazier had fought there seven times, most recently in February, when he unified the heavyweight title by beating Jimmy Ellis. What they didn’t see coming—what no one did—was the out-of-left-field interest of a talent agent best known for representing the likes of Elton John, Elizabeth Taylor, and Glen Campbell.
Jerry Perenchio didn’t have any clients in boxing but he loved the pageantry that surrounded the Ali–Quarry fight when he saw it via closed circuit in Los Angeles and decided right then that he wanted to produce Ali’s fight with Frazier. When he started reaching out to his very rich Hollywood clients, however, he was surprised to discover that they didn’t share his enthusiasm for spending $5 million to secure the rights. He’d exhausted most of his Rolodex before he finally called one of the most prominent owners in sports to ask for a lunch.
With teams in the NFL (Washington Redskins), the NHL (Los Angeles Kings), and the NBA (Los Angeles Lakers), Jack Kent Cooke understood big events. He also hosted fights at his Forum in Inglewood. And his eyes lit up in his Los Angeles office when Perenchio described his vision for a spectacular that would transcend boxing. As he’d later say, “[Perenchio] was the greatest salesman I ever knew. He epitomized a positive attitude.”
The beauty of what they worked out was that neither actually put up a cent. Cooke provided a $4.5 million letter of credit against the eventual proceeds, and in order to keep the fight in New York—not in the Houston Astrodome, which was also lobbying heavily for it—the Madison Square Garden executives threw in the remaining $500,000. “Once Jerry put $2.5 million out there for each fighter, it was case closed,” promoter Bob Arum would recall. “That blew everyone’s mind. No fighter had ever made anything like that in the history of boxing. Not Jack Dempsey, not Gene Tunney, not Louis.”
Sonny was following those negotiations closely. And according to a never-before-reported incident, he was already counting the cash he was going to get from his cut.
—
The details of the deal that Sonny may have struck with the Nation of Islam on the eve of Sonny’s rematch with Ali in 1965 have never been fleshed out. And they may end up being unknowable. But according to a former Nevada state assemblyman, Sonny was under the clear impression that he was entitled to a cut of Ali’s $2.5 million guarantee.
One afternoon in December 1970, after he got out of the hospital, he was at Friendly Liquor Store, drinking vodka and playing rummy with his sidekicks, when they started asking him about the reports they’d read that Frazier was close to coming to terms with Ali. Listening in was a twenty-seven-year-old electrician named Gene Collins. Years later, after he became a Nevada state assemblyman and a two-term president of the Las Vegas NAACP, Collins would sit in the lounge at Jerry’s Nugget Casino, not far from where Friendly’s stood, and recall how Sonny got more and more animated as they talked about the size of Ali’s paycheck.
“This is the first time I’ve ever mentioned this because I don’t usually talk about stuff like that,” Collins told me. “But Sonny was shooting his mouth off that he had a portion of Ali’s contract. I thought it was awful strange that he’d be saying something like that. It was definitely out of place, if you ask me. Everybody was kind of stunned. He was drinking. But to come out and say that . . .”
Collins wasn’t the only one who heard Sonny make the claim. His friend Clyde “Rabbit” Watkins said the same thing when I met him in his home. “We was at the Cove Hotel and he told me, ‘I’m gonna get some money as long as Ali is fighting.’ How much, I don’t know. But he said he’d have money for the rest of his life.”
The twin recollections—offered separately and without prompting—suggest that Sonny was counting on Ali to support him now that his fighting career was done. Whether a deal really existed wasn’t necessarily the point. Sonny believed a deal existed.
The disclosures also explain why some very powerful people might have started to worry that Sonny was talking too much about the money he was going to get from Ali . . . too much for his—and their—own good.